Weathering Cultures
Weathering Cultures is a product of my current research project, Weathering Colonial Calcutta, but the questions I explore here extend beyond academia. As I delved into historical and cultural responses to climate, seasons and the weather, I became increasingly fascinated by the many ways weather weaves into everyday life, mythology, language, and art. This site brings together that curiosity, blending scholarly insights with public storytelling.
Weathering Colonial Calcutta is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship project exploring an urban, material and cultural history of colonial Calcutta as a story of changing ideas about, and everyday experiences of the weather. The project offers critical insights into the differential and multi-layered interactions between scientific knowledge-making and literary production of the weather, and also reveals everyday experiences of the weather as cultural acts infused with meanings that were socially constructed and historically specific.
“Weather is not simply written into our landscapes. It leaves its traces on our bodies, emotions, societies, architecture, spaces, lingers in the memory, and affects the way we interact with each other and the natural environment.”
Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton
“Open Space: Weathering”, Feminist Review, 118 (2018): 81
“Not all bodies weather the same — weathering is a situated phenomena embedded in social and political worlds.”
“South-east view of the new Government House, Calcutta” (cropped). British Library Maps 115.46b, January 1805